Why I hate Reddit part 2

Reddit CEO Ellen Pao. Breitbart/Reuters.

I've talked at length about why I dislike Reddit. That discussion can be found here. In that post I criticized Reddit for being taken over by the radical social justice oriented left, for their tendency to censor things they don't like while at the same time saying they support free speech, and how arbitrary their moderation was. So why beat a dead horse? Because Reddit has doubled down on all these things.

Reddit has banned at least 5 subreddits for "harassment". The most popular of these by far is r/fatpeoplehate, which had 150,000 subscribers and was the 13th most popular on the site. They also banned a few other subreddits, which are probably too vulgar to post here. 

Now I am not going to defend the content of fatpeoplehate. I never visited it but it sounded pretty terrible. From what I understand it was mostly about making fun of fat people (which probably isn't justified) and making fun of fat acceptance people (which absolutely is). It's pretty gross but should it be censored? 

Of course not! Nobody is immune to criticism, even if that criticism is brash and or offensive. And as much as some people would wish otherwise, the overweight are not a protected class that should be free from ever having their feelings hurt. If you ban criticism of fat people pretty soon you can ban criticism of anything, including the government. 

(For a quick tangent, though it's probably wrong to make fun of fat people, the fact acceptance movement is an obviously bad thing. Being fat is really bad for your health and people should not be proud of something that will probably greatly reduce their life. And I say that as someone that should really lose some weight).

The reason given for banning fatpeoplehate was that it was a "harassment" sub.  But that distinction seems to be completely arbitrary. After all, shitredditsays still exists and only exists to harass other users. But since they are part of the social justice crowd, anything they do is forgiven and accepted. And there are so many more horrible subreddits that are much worse then fatpeoplehate and even the other subreddits that were banned that still exists. Not that they should be censored either, but the point still stands. 

Of course, all of this will have the opposite effect then what the staff of Reddit desires. There is something called the "Streisand Effect". Back in 2003 Barbra Streisand tried to censor pictures of her house that had showed up on the internet. This caused a huge backlash that resulted in more people caring about the pictures of her house and the pictures spread far and wide across the internet.

In short censoring something on the internet won't work unless you can censor the whole thing. Right now more people are talking about fatpeoplehate then ever before. It's all over Twitter, Facebook, Reddit itself, the various Chans and even this very blog. Trying to censor stuff on the internet almost always has the opposite effect. I can't believe, after everything that happened last year with Gamergate, that people still don't know this. All you will accomplish with censorship is to make everyone mad and blow up whatever you were trying to get rid off.

So why censor? It has a lot to do with Reddit's new CEO, Ellen Pao. Before she got her job at Reddit, she was suing her former company for sex discrimination, a case which she lost and lost hard. She's the the far left politically and it's clear that she doesn't support free speech. So even if she does understand that censoring people is going to have a negative effect, she doesn't care. She thinks that censorship is a good thing if it makes people feel safe.

Which is, in my mind, evil. Censorship is almost always wrong (the only exception would be for knowledge that could cause human extinction, and I am pretty sure that doesn't even exist). People aren't supposed to feel safe it if means that they are living in a reality where information is filtered out until what is true is not nearly as important as what is politically correct.

So what happens to Reddit now? There is a chance that this could be their "Digg" moment. Sure Digg still exists, but the reason they are a joke right now is because their population left for Reddit after they changed their policies. Already people are trying to move the voat.co, which has collapsed under the weight of new users.

My guess is that Reddit will probably still exist as a liberal hugbox, while voat.co will probably take over as the leader. Something similar happened with the chans after gamergate happened. But if there is any justice in the world Reddit will collapse and serve as a warning against censoring unpopular speech.